When Lionel announced the Legacy Consolidations, Steve at Mr Muffin's trains took suggestions for custom runs and received a flurry of ideas. Unfortunately, not all the ideas made it to production, but enough interest was triggered for him to order seval undecorated models which he would send to Harry Heike for decaling and weathering. I and a handful of others had asked for a Norfolk & Western Consolidation.
Unfortunately, the N&W does not receive much interest in 3RO outside of the "Big 3". Smaller steam engines that served on the N&W often either are rarely produced and notoriously hard to find on the secondary market (eg, a 3rd Rail 4-8-0!), or don't make it into production at all. The N&W is one of the road names I collect, so with this predicament, a custom run 2-8-0 in N&W - to model the N&W's class W2 - was a natural choice for me.
When doing some research on the prototype, I found most were significantly different from the Lionel model. I do not remember most of the issues, but a key one that stuck out like a sore thumb was that the headlamp was mounted near the top of the smoke box on the prototype, while the Lionel model had it mounted in the center of the smokebox. However, while pouring over the NWHS photo collection, I did find a couple of N&W 2-8-0s with a centered headlight. One of these was N&W #684. Out of the handful of prototype photos I looked at, I decided the Lionel model could mostly closely resemble the #684. One picture of the 684 can be found on the NWHS archive here.
Harry did a great job bringing the prototype to life with the decals and weathering, as seen in the photos below.
Unfortunately I do not have a layout, so back in the box she'll go, but I had to at least take it out for a look 
Thank you Steve and Harry for making this possible!
